Welcome to yet another review of an application for Linux.
Wait! This cannot be, for Linux has no applications! This is
well-known, a fact we've heard since the days of “Windows is the
future, get used to it!” and is probably the reason Linux has no
user base and has failed miserably in the server market and the
stock market. Hence, one must conclude that this spreadsheet is in
actuality a spectre, and although you think
it's real, it is a fantasy, as are the millions of Linux users you
thought existed and the newbie Linux gazillionaires.

The subject for today is the Xess Spreadsheet for Linux,
Standard Edition. We must specify Standard Edition, because there
is also a professional edition which handles very large projects.
However, the standard edition deals with up to 1024 columns and
99,999 rows per sheet, with 512 sheets per workbook, which should
be more than enough for your next stat class assignment. Xess has
been good about supporting several distributions of Linux, so you
can almost certainly run it regardless of what distribution you
have (which is, if I may opine, the way things ought to be). What
is so special about this spreadsheet, and why might you prefer it
to the StarOffice or Applixware spreadsheets?

First Impressions

To be honest, my very first impression was “Ack! What a
stupid license!” You know the kind, those last-minute “installing
this software indicates agreement” licenses full of the weirdest,
off-the-wall restrictions, including a ban on un-assembling (do
they mean disassembling?), de-compiling (if you figure out how to
do this, let me know) and reverse engineering. Forbidding these
things is rather absurd, and the legal reasoning behind these
last-minute licenses is about as meaningful as the reasoning of
little kids who always say, “I called it!”

Disassembly of a program (though not necessarily of a
spreadsheet) is a superb way to begin learning assembly code, while
reverse engineering had a very large hand in promoting the PC
phenomenon (imagine if no one had reverse engineered the first IBM
PC to enable cloning). De-compiling would be so clever and an
excellent way of open sourcing binaries, but as far as I know, it
hardly works. So why forbid these things, since they're no threat
at all and the last-minute license probably isn't legally binding?
Just in case. Gotta call it. The other problem is the bit about
reserving the right to revoke the license, which is irritating. I'd
certainly not depend on a product if someone had the right to
revoke it whenever, but apparently that's how commercial software
is. CD manufacturers don't bother with this licensing nonsense, and
it hasn't hurt them any. At least the license is short, as is the
small-footprint installation of the spreadsheet.

My second impression was “Geez, I wish we had this in
college.” Instead, we had silly Windows boxes, with “blinky the
dancing paper clip” et al. UNIX has such an academic history, I
don't understand why it isn't the de facto standard in
universities, but for some reason it isn't, although recent student
protests may chase Windows out of colleges. Now that we have Linux,
a free and superior OS, there's no excuse to keep running Windows
in the schools (besides, a free-source OS is politically very
correct). And, what with high-quality applications like Xess (or,
for example, Word Perfect and the office suites), there's even less
of an excuse.

Even though it comes from the commercial sphere, Xess is one
more brick in a solid foundation of Linux applications. A free OS
running a high-quality commercial application is, after all,
preferable to a buggy, proprietary OS running a bloated proprietary
application (with embedded flight simulator). What you may infer
from the preceding sentence is that Xess is a high-quality
spreadsheet, so operating from this assumption, let's have a
look-see.

Xess Can Do

It's honestly a bit dull to list everything a package can do,
and it risks sounding more like an advertisement than any sort of
review. Still, if you're thinking of using a spreadsheet, you
probably want to know what it's capable of doing. There isn't room
to list everything, so I recommend going to
www.ais.com/Xess/xess4_features.html
for the complete list. I'll try to cover the major points
here.

Xess looks like any other spreadsheet (Excel, Lotus,
StarCalc, Applixware Spreadsheets, etc.), so its interface is
obvious and intuitive. Xess has all the functions one expects of a
spreadsheet, including some outstanding ones. At the basic level,
Xess has the standard functions complete with conditional and
Boolean operators, iterative and double-precision calculation,
inter-sheet cell linking and formula constraint checking. The
mathematical functions include the standards found on a good pocket
calculator, such as exponents, logs, trig, matrices, as well as
sigmoid, gamma and log gamma functions. The matrix operations in
particular are extensive, even including Fourier transforms,
correlation matrices, curve fitting and linear equation solving.
Financial functions include the usual exciting things like rates of
return, present and future values, interest rates, yields and all
that. Statistical functions are thorough, and on the whole, there
is more offered than I remember finding in StarOffice or
Applixware.

Maybe it's funny that Xess is distributed by a company called
Business Logic Corporation, because Xess, while wholly adequate in
the financial department, is rather well-suited to scientific,
statistical and mathematical operations. In any event, the test of
whether a spreadsheet could be useful to me is if it can be my
pocket calculator. Xess comes closer to substituting for my pocket
calculator than other Linux spreadsheets, and even has some stat
and matrix functions my calculator doesn't have.

Xess is largely a calculation-oriented spreadsheet. The
calculation engine must be praised, because it's actually fast,
although the graphing capabilities are less extensive. The graphics
basics are covered, and you can make the standard scatter, line,
area, bar, stacked bar, histogram, pie, surface, contour, polar,
hi-lo, control and box graphs, and there is much technical
flexibility. Still, there isn't much aesthetic control beyond
standard representation, which is fine. As for calculation, there
are more functions than I can count, nearly 250, all of which are
nicely referenced in the manual. I would be more than surprised if
someone found the calculation capabilities inadequate.

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